The Fragility of Democracy: an essay on our times
Part I: The lessons of authoritarianism
Much have I travelled in the realms of authoritarianism. I’m the daughter of a man who was conscripted into the Austrian army at seventeen to fight for Hitler. Mercifully, my father was taken prisoner after a year and spent the rest of the war effectively under the protection of the Allies although even in an American prisoner of war camp, he and his friends were attacked by other prisoners for their anti-Nazi sentiments. Returning to the States after the war, he met a woman escaping the gloom of post-war Britain and the pair married and started a new life in England. In the house I grew up there were disagreements about many things but about the evils of Nazism, never.
I was a year into a PhD on philosophical responses to the holocaust when I noticed — doh! — the connection between my history and choice of research subject. I read books on the history of Nazism and — much more harrowing — personal testimonies from those who had been in concentration camps. It’s dark, almost incomprehensible reading that I never want to repeat. But my personal witnesses to the rise of Nazism in 1930s’ Vienna in the form of my father and his sister would never talk about their experiences.
Years later, visiting Syria as part of research for a book, I had a brief taste of what life might…
